Night, Neon Read online

  Lingering not far away in one of the aisles, pretending to peruse shelves of the most banal and predictable of Campbell’s soups, I observe that Keisha is in fact an attractive woman, if you are not repelled by her extreme thinness and the sight of her scalp showing through her downy hair like a private body part. Her facial features are delicate, her skin is strangely unlined, though sallow, with an olive cast—she is (just possibly) of mixed blood, as the vulgar cliché has it, light-skinned black, northern African, Middle Eastern, even (East) Indian. Her eyes are very dark, beautiful (you might say, if beautiful were not another cliché that I would never use professionally), and they appear to be more alert, brighter than I have ever seen them. Though Keisha is wearing her usual uniform-like clothes—loose-fitting smock, slacks—she has looped a rose-patterned scarf around her slender neck, a festive note.

  Laughing at a lame joke a (male) customer has told to her. Pretending to laugh. The first time (I am sure) that I have heard Keisha laugh.

  Am I responsible? Suffusing the poor woman with a sense of worth, dignity? Hope?

  After ten, fifteen minutes pushing a shopping cart through the narrow aisles of the store, I reappear at the checkout area at just the right time: Keisha is the cashier without a customer.

  Setting my several items on the counter beside the cash register. Exchanging the usual (perfunctory, banal) greetings with the cashier bearing the name tag KEISHA. As if there were no (secret) connection between us—as if I didn’t know so much more than Keisha knows of the circumstances of that morning’s surprise gift.

  Keisha is smiling, friendly. Not quite so shy-abashed as usual. Definitely something has happened to lighten her spirits.

  A sensation of vertigo comes over me. That this woman, a stranger to me, is yet linked to me, unknowing.

  Unique in my life. That a stranger and I share a secret, though it is more fully my secret than it is hers.

  “Paper or plastic, sir?”—a familiar query uttered with more warmth than usual.

  But already I am reaching for a paper bag to bag the groceries myself.

  And already on the jubilant walk home I am planning the second gift, to be sent to Keisha in ten days.

  This time, one hundred dollars.

  In the shape of a crisp, newly minted one-hundred-dollar bill—which I am sure Keisha has never seen before, never held in her hand.

  Do I even recall which U.S. president is on the one-hundred-dollar bill?—I do not, for it is Benjamin Franklin; and through some clumsy oversight of U.S. history, the great Franklin was never elected president.

  Having to make a special trip to the local bank to acquire the bill. Not a word of explanation to the female clerk, no awkward small talk, lame jokes of the kind others feel obliged to make in the bank, clerks as well as customers—polite and courteous and without expression, my way of confronting the world.

  “Here you are, sir. Is there anything more we can do for you today?”

  “No.”

  After a beat, coolly—“Thank you.”

  Hurrying home then, to prepare the envelope for Keisha.

  This time I have decided to make the message a little longer—FOR KEISHA, WHO IS SO KIND.

  Hesitating between good and kind. Deciding on kind, because it is kindness that seems more significant.

  A good person might not be actively kind. But a kind person is actively good.

  Addressing the envelope and mailing it, as before. Calculating when I should return to the grocery—neither too soon nor too late …

  Perhaps I should explain. Though you have not asked.

  (Stupid questions are more or less the rule of interviews like yours. But stupid questions that violate protocol are taboo, and our greatest taboo is the proscription against asking about money.)

  Money means very little to me. In fact I have no idea how much money I have in assorted investments, bank accounts scattered in several states. (Twenty million? Thirty? Only my accountant knows, and Gopnik is sworn to secrecy.) Royalties from books, sales and resales of publication rights over a lengthy (if unspectacular) career can accrue a fair amount of money, if not carelessly spent; of course, N__ is notoriously a celibate bachelor, has no dependents, thus no obvious heirs. Interviewers who don’t hesitate to ask me asinine questions about where I get my ideas at least have the good sense not to ask about money.

  It is true, for some thirty or more years my books sold moderately well, for literary fiction of an avant-garde sort. Inadvertently I’d become a sort of cult figure, having repudiated my (working-class) background to explore worlds of surreal, baroque beauty, cerebral phantasmagorias, like an Eros-obsessed Borges; as I have determined to keep my private life private—out of shyness so extreme as to suggest morbidity—my reclusiveness has been mistaken for an aristocratic arrogance, which in turn has whetted the curiosity of the weak-minded. Films were made of my most obscure fictions, as of my most popular fictions, by both American and European filmmakers, as well as by the Korean fantasist Park Chan-wook. For a brief while in the 1980s there was a TV series adapted from my shorter fictions, in the mode of a more esoteric and intellectually demanding Twilight Zone.

  All the while, I’ve had few expenses. I travel infrequently, save most of my money, invest in ultraconservative bonds, live very comfortably/frugally on my interest as my imagination and energies have begun to wane, and I find myself unable to write novels, even novellas, concentrating more recently on enigmatic prose pieces that mimic nonfiction, in the service of what I would call “higher fictions” (if the term were not so pretentious). As I have lost what minimal curiosity I once had in the complexities of characterization, the bedrock of the traditional novel, I have gained a keener interest in the complexities of “concept”: how a concept, or idea, can be made to develop, as if it were a character in a way; as an unpromising seed or bulb that appears rotted, stringy, hairy, can yet be coaxed into sending out shoots into earth, flourishing in a cracked flowerpot, and finally “blossoming”—like my favorite spring flower, narcissus, with its pale, delicate petals, its faint, sweet fragrance that is the very emblem of fragility and finitude.

  In this way boldly exploring not a mere “mystery,” but the essence, the germinating seed, of mystery itself.

  And so: perhaps that is why I am drawn to Keisha. Not repelled by the woman’s extreme fragility and aura of (dare I say it?) premature doom, but instead attracted by it.

  6.

  Eagerly anticipating my return to McGuire’s Grocery.

  For the first time in memory, waking early, before dawn, with a wild sort of elation—anticipation—(is this what others mean by curiosity, an ardent fluttering of the pulse?)—to see what effect my second gift has had upon the cashier.

  Discovering that I am frequently glancing at my watch. I am frequently thinking of her.

  Surely the first time in my life that I have thought so intensely of a stranger whose last name is unknown to me.

  And now that I think of it, there is something touching, I suppose, in this curiosity. For curiosity is a cabinet of vulnerabilities. Ignorance is the bulwark against the risks of curiosity. I do not know, therefore I am. I yearn to know, therefore I am incomplete.

  Curiosity is a habit of youth. The desperation to know what others think of you. The curse of adolescence, wishing to control what others think. While at my age I scarcely care what I think of myself, let alone what others think of me.

  (Perhaps, perversely, as interviewers have claimed, there is a “renewed interest” in the fictions of N__ of the 1980s; it isn’t likely that I will ever know, since I lack the curiosity to investigate. I do own a computer, a very old Dell, but the last time I checked, the clumsy machine was not connected to the internet, and its word-processing skills are so crude, I prefer my 1996 Japanese electric typewriter, now a sort of antique treasure among typewriter aficionados.)

  Three days later, I return to the grocery. Late afternoon. And there is Keisha at her usual station, distractedly scanning i
tems, bagging groceries—in loose-fitting smock, slacks—no festive scarf tied about her throat today.

  To my dismay I see that Keisha is unsmiling. Slump-shouldered. Her face has been made up with a particularly unconvincing rosy-peach makeup to disguise what appears to be bruising beneath her right eye. Her upper lip is swollen. Her delicately boned nose is swollen. She has been beaten. By—

  Husband? A jealous husband.

  Nothing I could have anticipated. Given gifts of cash by an anonymous admirer, the poor woman has been suspected of—infidelity?

  My gifts, meant only to enliven the poor convalescent’s life, have backfired for her.

  No one has noticed me in the grocery so far. I don’t think so. There is a little flurry of activity, unrelated to Keisha, at the other cash register.

  Trying to disguise my alarm, I push a grocery cart into the interior of the store as if I have come simply to shop. (Will anyone notice that I have returned to the store, so soon? I am hoping that N__ is as invisible to others as they are usually invisible to him.)

  With a few innocuous items to purchase, I return to the front of the store. My heart is beating rapidly, contritely. Though Keisha has two customers waiting in line and another cashier has none, I make my way to Keisha’s cash register, as if not happening to notice. My behavior is senseless, suspicious. I am beginning to perspire, a creature at bay.

  Waiting in line. Gazing (covertly) at Keisha. The shell of her head looks particularly fragile today. Bruised, swollen face. Partially blackened eye. Yet bravely she has tried to disguise her injuries. She has even applied lipstick to her partially swollen, asymmetrical mouth. All day (I assume) the poor woman has had to endure stares, clumsy queries, or murmured commiseration from nosy strangers.

  My dear! What has happened to you?—I will not inquire.

  Though my heart contracts with sorrow for Keisha. Unless it’s anger for whoever has abused her.

  To whom is the unhappy woman married, who could not share in his wife’s (minor) good fortune but felt obliged to punish her for it? Another time I note the wedding band, with a pang of contempt.

  Puerile symbol of the marital bond. Such ordinariness suffocates.

  “Paper or plastic, sir?”—the cashier’s voice is low, hoarse.

  “Paper. Why do you always ask?”

  Keisha glances at me, startled. Sharpness in my voice that I hadn’t intended. Possibly I’d meant to sound commiserative, sympathetic. But the reply is awkward, for I am an awkward person outside the confines of my being, in which I am precisely calibrated.

  Keisha murmurs “Sorry!” It is too late for me to murmur sorry! to her, but I set about putting the several purchases into the bag myself to compensate for the sharpness in my voice, which I did not intend, I swear.

  My poor dear, I will help you escape. If you will let me.

  7.

  And now I am at an impasse. For if I continue to send Keisha gifts of cash and her husband discovers them, he will punish her, perhaps more savagely than he has done. My impression is that Keisha is too honest to dissemble, the kind of woman who feels guilt over small matters even when she is guiltless.

  A wild thought comes to me and keeps me awake late into the night—I could arrange for Keisha to receive a large sum of money, which would free her from the brute. (Thousands of dollars?) (One million dollars?)

  For much of a day the possibility consoles me. Trying to imagine what such a gift could mean to a woman like Keisha, who is obliged not only to work at a minimal wage in McGuire’s dingy market but who has just recently completed a cycle of brutal medical treatment.

  A trust fund, perhaps. Monthly allotments. Some (legal) way of providing the woman with financial independence, at least.

  Thinking—would a woman like Keisha, no doubt a longtime inhabitant of Herrontown, Pennsylvania, with probably no more than a high school diploma, if even that, be capable of breaking ties to an oppressive husband? Asserting her own dependence at her age?

  One million dollars, gifted to a grocery store clerk! It could not be kept secret, the spouse would know. The family would know. Relatives. Neighbors. Media would sweep upon the frail woman greedily. Total strangers would seek her out, hoping to exploit her.

  As I work out how to proceed, I have to concede that something like curiosity is driving me now. Each morning, instead of lying near comatose in bed, scarcely able to open my eyes, I wake eagerly, wondering what will happen next: what I will direct, that will happen next. For the cashier’s (ordinary) life is in my control, if I wish it.

  “How exciting life is! I’d never realized”—this bizarre remark is uttered to my tax accountant, Gopnik, who stares at me as if I have suddenly begun speaking in a foreign language.

  Rare that I say anything to Gopnik beyond a minimum of words. Tax statements, bank statements, stacks of canceled checks and receipts. In Gopnik’s presence a robotic efficiency courses through me. Even my murmured words of greeting and farewell are the utterances of a robot.

  But now Gopnik is nonplussed. Smiles inanely, as if to agree with me, however bizarre and improbable the sentiment—How exciting life is … in Herrontown, PA.

  Gopnik doesn’t live in Herrontown. Gopnik lives in Doylestown, forty minutes away.

  Inquiring of the accountant how it might be arranged—a “trust,” established by an unknown benefactor, with interest paid in (monthly?) allotments to an individual who would be given minimum information about the arrangement.

  “Well. It could be done”—Gopnik’s reply is notably lacking in enthusiasm.

  Why would it be done, who would be the beneficiary of such a (desperate?) transaction, Gopnik knows better than to inquire of his reticent client.

  8.

  Yes, it is true: I am betraying my initial “neutrality”—“objectivity”—as one whose relationship to life is essentially that of the investigator/experimenter.

  Led by curiosity to discover the grocery clerk’s schedule: five days a week, with Mondays off. And where the grocery clerk lives: one point eight miles away from my own house on the river, though inland, in a “working-class” residential area of Herrontown.

  Rare for me to become so involved with anyone—anything.

  Rare for me to experience such feeling.

  But here I am, across the street from the grocery store on one unexpectedly mild afternoon in April. Waiting for Keisha to leave with a coworker at the end of their shifts, six p.m. Following the coworker’s vehicle at a discreet distance in my own vehicle. Noting where Keisha is dropped off.

  Driving past the small clapboard house on Mill Run Street, a street of small, interchangeable clapboard houses. Some of the houses run-down, needing repainting, repair. One or two of the houses abandoned, boarded up. Puddles from melted snow and ice glistening in driveways. Mud-rutted front yards. In the small front yard of the cashier’s house at 54 Mill Run Street, bright yellow daffodils beaten down, broken after rain.

  She has planted these daffodils, I seem to know. Broken after rain, mud-flecked, yet still alive, vivid yellow.

  Oh! The knowledge is a needle to the heart. Seeking beauty even in ugliness.

  Driving past the house, circling the block. Slow. No hurry. Where else to go? Nowhere else calls to me. Driving past the small, undistinguished clapboard house another time. Daring to park a short distance away.

  Lighting a cigarette. (Seven years, five months since I’ve smoked.) Sudden thrill in the lungs, as if youth itself is flooding back.

  For some time sitting here, smoking. Watching the house through the rearview mirror on the exterior of the car, beside the driver.

  Watching the house—her house? Why?

  Might’ve felt discomfort, unease—shame. Yet oddly I do not. Emptiness of mind: stained sink into which a thin trickle of water falls from a faucet. As it falls, it drains out.

  From time to time, vehicles pass my parked car. Slow-moving vehicles, driven by faceless figures.

  Am I waiting for him to come ho
me?—the brute husband.

  (There is a narrative in which N__ might pay to have the “brute husband” dispatched, disappeared. Ah, I could afford to pay an assassin, in fact two assassins, a very handsome sum! But this is not that narrative.)

  About to pull away from the curb when an insolent-looking boy of about fourteen appears, pedaling a gleaming red bicycle, turning into the rutted driveway beside the clapboard house.

  She has bought the boy that bicycle!—I know it.

  Not that the bicycle is new. Might’ve been purchased secondhand from Mike’s Bikes New & Used in town, which sells a few expensive Italian racing bikes amid less expensive American bikes and secondhand bikes. But the boy’s bicycle is a recent purchase, I am sure of this.

  Driving away. Pressing too hard on the gas pedal, the car lurches. Goddamn! Damn her.

  The money I’ve given the woman was for her, not her family. Can’t be trusted to spend money on herself. What are families but leeches.

  So angry! Feeling betrayed.

  Deciding then, I will never return to dingy McGuire’s. Never again risking such ignominy.

  Led by curiosity to discover Keisha’s last name: Olen.

  9.

  … soon then calculating that I must seek out Keisha to speak to her directly. To address her in my own person. I have seen in your face a soul of beauty. You are kind, generous, good. You must be protected from your own goodness. My wish is to make you happy …

  All this is true. Yet the words are laughably banal, vulgar.

  Such ordinary words, I can’t bring myself to utter. My fear is that one day I will wish to commit suicide, a most reasonable decision, yet, being unable to compose a suitable note, I will be thwarted and forced to live forever.

  Silence is not really an option in matters of suicide. As nature abhors a vacuum, so silence is a kind of vacuum that others will noisily fill with idiotic theories that will debase the dignity of the suicide simply in being suggested.